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5 Steps to Better Conversion Rate Optimization

At SugarCRM marketing we spend a significant amount of time on conversion rate optimization.

What is it?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a system of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action. Typically, we focus our goal conversions on form fills, aka leads.

We’ve built a killer integration between our CRM (Sugar of course) and Google Analytics that allows us to run sophisticated CRO tests designed to drive not only better form conversion rates, but ultimately more pipeline for our friends in Sales. I’ll be highlighting a few of these tests in future posts. However, I want to first share the template we use to run repeatable and actionable conversion rate optimization tests.

Step 1

Leverage user journey testing to understand what is impacting form conversions on a key landing page.

If you need somewhere to start, I suggest first looking at high-traffic landing pages that generate a healthy amount of lead flow

In addition to Google Anaytics, Crazy Egg and Hotjar are two tools we use to better understand our user journeys

What assumptions can you draw from Step 1? Use them to drive design variations to test.

Step 3

Test the new landing page in paid channels first to arrive at quick insights.

Dial-in creative.

Launching CRO through paid channels enables you to send highly targeted traffic to your tests. In other words, you have a better understanding of your audience and intent and how it influences what you are reading in the test results.

Now, it’s OK to launch tests to organic journeys, but just be aware that you are casting a wider audience net at this point and it may complicate your results.

Step 4

Expand the test by driving organic web traffic to landing pages. Arrive at final insights.

Related to above, we recommend first testing paid and then expanding to organic due to having better control on your targeting and audience involvement.

Step 5

Launch winning landing pages across all channels. These will often differ between paid and organic.

We found that winning tests often vary by channel in that paid traffic can behave very differently from organic traffic on the same test.